BACK TO SCIENCE FICTION
20. Sep, 2009 
9 Comments
My little mashup of the Air Force commercial image (It’s not science fiction) has drawn a fair amount of attention from some folks over at StumbleUpon.
I would also like my adsense ads to drop the promotion for all of the SP sites, services & etc., which seem, for the most part, to be ads for services that take advantage of wannabe authors. (And I’d prefer to have the adsense engine do it itself rather than having to start trying to guess what key words are going to trigger the wrong kinds of ads), so I’m using the opportunity presented to put together a post that is ALL (almost) SCIENCE FICTION.
Please bear with me: Science Fiction. Sci Fi. SciFi. Speculative Fiction. Spec Fic. SpecFic. Genre Fiction. Steampunk. Cyberpunk. Greenpunk. Space Opera. Science Fantasy. Urban Fantasy. High Fantasy. Sword and Sorcery. Military SF. Hard SF. New Wave SF. Paranormal Fantasy. Donkey Kong.
Neil Gaiman. Charlie Stross. John Scalzi. Cory Doctorow. Robert Sawyer. Nick Mamatas. Robert Heinlein. Arthur C Clarke. Isaac Asimov. A. Bertram Chandler. David Drake. Mike Resnick. Edward Lerner. Larry Niven. Eric Flint. John Ringo. Baxter. Weber. Ellison. Delany. Silverberg. Piper. Russell. Brown. Ooops! Cherryh. Bradford. Butler. Russ. Wilhelm. Norton. Bradley. Ursula LeGuin.
Tor. Baen. Angry Robot. Haikasoru. Subterranean Press. DAW. Del Rey. Ace.
Fandom. Fanzine. Worldcon. Hugo Award. Nebula Award.
Ahem.
Gary Farber mentioned that my tag line “It Used To Be Science Fiction” presented a negative aspect and didn’t quite accomplish what I was after, which was the idea that since we are living in a science fiction world, genre folks OUGHT to be getting some play out of the fact that all of US (trufen – which includes the authors, artists, publishers, conrunners, reader and et al) thought up, experienced, played with and were immersed in this stuff well before the industrial-military complex threw enough money at it to turn it into reality.
Gary was right. “Used to be” has that has-been feel and, despite prognostications to the contrary, I refuse to accept SF’s demise. So I put some thought into coming up with a better tagline and have come up with two. I’d appreciate hearing which of these two you all think actually gets the job done. Or if you have any better suggestions.
So here they are, my two options for a promotional SCIENCE FICTION (SF, SciFi, SpecFic) poster, one that gets across the idea that EVERYTHING that makes life neat, simple, easy and explosive for the mundanes is something that we all knew about ages and ages ago.
In other news, progress on revamping the site continues, but must pause for the brief respite that is sleep. I’m just about interneted out right now.
“Thus, for example, “Stef” became the name of Leah Zeldes Smith and Dick Smith’s mildly well-known fanzine a couple of decades or so ago.”
Our Hugo-nominated fanzine is much better known by its actual name, “Stet.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STET_(fanzine)
Well, crap. Okay, I know it’s a work in progress. Meanwhile, a warning that people can’t use tags, while you don’t have them working, would be helpful. Heck, now I have to go back and see if my links came out in previous comment on other thread.
Hey, HTML tags aren’t working.
“Still, some bad stuff was SF first, as well. Orwell’s ‘1984′ springs to mind for some reason.”
It’s entirely unclear from this statement whether the author means “bad” stuff to be a statement about the quality of 1984, or merely descriptively that it’s a novel whose purpose is to create a horrifying dystopia.
“When you picked up a book that had that rocket and saturn on the spine, you knew it was ‘SF’, but not what you were going to get.”
And there was a hundred times less of it than nowadays, and the number of well-written books was far lower, and the average of quality amongst the best-written books was lower.
Otherwise, Sturgeon’s Law (or “second law,” if you prefer) applied then and now.
Morva,
I actually think that the sub-genre thing is a negative. Fractionalizing leads to dissipation of effort and focus. When you picked up a book that had that rocket and saturn on the spine, you knew it was “SF”, but not what you were going to get.
Now you are shoveled into one niche or another – and many folks never explore beyond the first one they liked.
I’ll vote for, “It was science fiction first.” It does have that positive spin.
Still, some bad stuff was SF first, as well. Orwell’s “1984″ springs to mind for some reason.
Also, I don’t think SF is in demise. It’s shifting a little, but look at that long list of sub-genres you’ve got, and that doesn’t even cover them all.
Cheers
Morva Shepley
“It was science fiction first” is stronger, because it puts the emphasis on “science fiction,” rather than “first.”
Richard, in similar fashion to the mutation of “sci-fi” into “sky-fi” into “skiffy,” the shortened version of “scientifiction,” “stf,” wound up being jokingly altered to “stef” by some back in the Seventies. Thus, for example, “Stef” became the name of Leah Zeldes Smith and Dick Smith’s mildly well-known fanzine a couple of decades or so ago.
Yeah. Science Fiction is reality… BEFORE it’s real. Or something like that? I dunno, the Science Fiction First, either way round, doesn’t quite work for me, though I’m not sure why. This probably corny.
By the way, in your listing of keywords, I don’t see scientifiction or sci-fi. Heh.